To give this dying horse one more lash, there are any number of concepts where some phenomenon, like light, which seems to be a continuum of frequencies/wave-lengths, gets moved into a circular arrangement like the color wheel to make some other aspect of the phenomenon a little easier to grasp or work with. Much like the temperature problem I mentioned earlier. Some of these aids (color wheel, cycle of fifths in music, even the basic clock) take over the underlying concept and make us think of them as being tied to the concept when they really aren’t. We human beings like to fool ourselves at every turn.
I have always thought that the “law of the excluded middle” where something is True if it can be shown it’s not False (and vice versa) leaves out a whole bunch of Maybe and It Depends. Fuzzy Logic is supposed to deal with that issue, I hear.
That’s kinda my point. The opposite of ‘exceed’ therefore does not need to cover being just right - the opposite of ‘exceed’ is ‘fall short’ (or any synonym for that).
The color wheel is not comparable to a clock though. Orange is the opposite of blue in a very real sense. Orange has no blue in it at all. If you mix orange paint with red or yellow you will make progressively redder or yellower orange, but if you mix it with blue it will cease to be orange altogether. It will turn grey. This only goes for the subtractive colors, of course, but that is still rather the default in the world.
It would depend on the context of “miracle” that you are using. I would say curse if using the most common usage of miracle (a sudden, unexpected good outcome that seems to come from a higher power).
The horse has rallied, he sat up and ate some soup today in fact.
It just doesn’t seem right to me that the opposite of a primary color should be a secondary color.
Red and yellow also have no blue in them at all. Why aren’t they its opposite?
If you mix orange paint with green or purple, it will also cease to be orange. You see, if you regard secondary and primary colors as the same thing (i.e., it is possible for orange to be the opposite of blue), then you must apply your logic equally. (i.e., purple and green are also opposites of blue, because the add-to-orange rule also applies to them.)
Really, what **Zeldar ** said is closest to the truth; I myself think of the secondary colors as a subset of the primary colors, not elgible to be opposites.
Sorry to sorta hijack your thread, Twickster. I love your word-related threads. (And your shaking-groovy-things threads! Utterly charming.)
What brujaja said, Twickster, regarding your threads and sense of humor.
Also, just one more swipe at the soup-guzzling nag. If color, as a field of concern, is removed from its basis in the electro-magnetic spectrum and thought of in its difficulties for finding matches at Home Depot or Lowe’s paint departments, I think the color wheel (or better still, the color solid), is a marvelous tool for thinking of how hues, and shades, and tints and all the other measuring scales like saturation, intensity, and the rest, can be made to apply to the raw colors in the rainbow (or a prism’s output). Once you bring in all the attributes of turquoise or puce or lime green, it gets progressively harder to think of a true opposite to any color.
It’s like, “what’s the opposite of A-Flat?”
And which 9:00 is the opposite of 3:00? The AM or the PM one or the one from exactly six months ago?
For those who see what I’m driving at, try to identify other linear or spectrum concepts that get re-visualized into clocks or wheels or circles or maybe even some other shape that bumps up the number of dimensions where the other members of the set reside. Once you orient things like time and temperature and maybe even emotions (love vs. hate) into neat little geometric arrangements it’s tempting to think that they actually behave that way.
Not to get overly philosophical, if I haven’t yet, but I believe that many (maybe most) of our problems as a “thinking” species stem from our desire to think of things in a binary way, where opposites rule. I confess to being a basic “black and white” type of person in most matters, where if it ain’t X, it has to be Y. But at least I recognize it as mental laziness.
To understand that colors truly do have opposites take a look here.
star at the little dot in the center for 30 seconds and then look at the white area. Your eyes relax into the opposite colors and the afterimage appears in different colors. This would not work if complimentary colors were merely a philosophical construct.
